It’s Raining Cats and Dogs and Monsters
Hi everyone! Sorry for the late blog this week; I finished a manuscript yesterday and my brain had to turn off for a day. But woo hoo! Time for vampires and bulldogs! 🙂
And also playing with my thrilling birthday presents, such as for instance:
Baroo?
Shiny new agility equipment! TADA! Don’t these hurdles look amazing? Kari and Steve MADE them for me!!! Also a tire jump and weave poles! Holy bananas! I tried to get an action shot, but the best I could get was this:
Is this what I’m supposed to do?
I had similar luck with Barney…
Hmmm…worth it? I’m not sure.
But they were both leaping and jumping most adorably after a few minutes. I’ll see if I can muster some better shots (maybe with weave poles!) next week, hopefully outdoors when it’s not raining. 🙂
Being done with this manuscript also means I can start getting excited about going to India, since now I’ve finished 5/6ths of the big multi-page things I need to do before then (well, except for all the revising, but that part is fun…right? right?). Eeeeep India YAY!
AND! I can also get ready for the thrilling Wands and Worlds Chat all the Erin Hunters are doing together on August 16th! Don’t forget to register early! If you haven’t registered by August 9th, you won’t be able to join the chat. And you can also start sending in questions now, in order to guarantee that at least one of your questions will be answered. As a bonus, if the question is one I can answer, I promise to get extremely excited and use an awful lot of exclamation points. :-) Possibly also some smiley faces! 🙂
It’s actually a little nerve-wracking because Warriors fans are SO smart and such tremendous experts on the series. I met some of them last week at the library talk in Ridgewood (yay!) and they were all amazing and brilliant (hi Madeline! hi Becca! hi Britta!). So I know I’m really going to have to study beforehand to make sure I don’t get anything wrong, and so I know for sure how much of the story is already out there (since I get to read ahead!).
Wouldn’t that be HORRIFYING, though? In a scandalous online debut for the new Erin Hunter, Tui accidentally reveals THE SHOCKING FINAL BOOK SECRETS OF POWER OF THREE! OK, that’s not going to happen, I promise (don’t worry, Vicky!). I don’t have nearly that much advance information. But I do know what happens in Seekers: Book Three, so I’ll be very careful not to spill the beans about who dies (nobody! I swear! nothing to see here!).
I am excited about getting to do this online, though, because unlike a library talk, for this I can wear my pyjamas. And Sunshine can come! I imagine she’ll be sitting on my lap licking my fingers while I try to type, not that that happens all the time or RIGHT NOW, or anything. 🙂
While you’re online signing up for Wands and Worlds, there’s another website I want to tell you about, because it’s a charity that is very special to the Erin Hunters: the Brightspirit Relief Fund. It’s a really sad story — you can read all about it on that site — but a lot of people are doing wonderful things to honor Emmy Cherry and her parents, and if you want to help (like if you have books you could send for the literacy giveaway), you can find out how on that site, and we’d all really appreciate it!
Also, if you’re anywhere near Russellville, Arkansas, on September 20th this year, Vicky will be there for a special event called Warriors Day, celebrating Emmy’s life and promoting literacy. It should be really amazing (I can tell you meeting Vicky is amazing!); all the details are at that website.
And Emmy and her parents will live on as Brightspirit, Shiningheart, and Braveheart in the fifth Warriors: Power of Three book, Long Shadows. A lot of you at the library talk wanted to know when the next books are coming out; it looks like the fourth Power of Three book (Eclipse) is set for September, followed by Long Shadows in November. And then Seekers 2 in January — my goodness! No wonder there has to be four of us! 🙂
In my travels around the Internet this past week (not procrastinating! no, no! looking for pictures of bears!), I came across this ridiculously adorable video. It’s part of the new season of Sesame Street, and I wanted to share it with you because (a) ridiculously adorable and (b) even if you’re too old for Sesame Street, I would argue that one is never too old for Feist + monsters + penguins + chickens just back from the shore. Of course, now I’m going to have this version of the song stuck in my head instead of the real one, but that’s OK ("I love counting, counting to the number four!").
Hee! Fantabulousness!
Well, since this blog is late anyway, I figured I’d blog about So You Think You Can Dance‘s finale (EEEEEE!), since after that I’ll have nothing to talk about for the rest of the summer (DEEP SIGH). I can’t believe it’s over already! Where did July go? Heck, where did JUNE go? Soon it’s going to be time for real TV to return! Well, hopefully Chuck and The Sarah Connor Chronicles will help make up for having to wait another year for more So You Think You Can Dance.
OK, first of all, I love Cat’s dress tonight! Shiny shiny! I think Cat Deeley is maybe the coolest person on TV. She’s so lovely and sweet to everyone. I totally want her to be my BFF. If I had to get rejected on national TV, I would definitely need a hug from her.
Secondly, I’m not even voting tonight because I LOVE ALL OF THEM! I’ll just be thrilled no matter which one wins. I think I love Twitch and Courtney’s solos the most, but Josh and Katee have been spectacular at all the choreography all the way through, so…difficult! I would have loved to see Will in the finale, but I was kind of madly in love with everyone in the top ten (when does that ever happen?), so I’ve been pretty happy with this show all season.
Favorite finale dance: Too hard! I actually liked a few of the dances last week even better than these (Mark & Courtney’s jazz , Chelsie & Twitch’s hip-hop, and Josh & Katee’s paso doble, for instance), but I loved the Crazy Russian Dance, and I think it’ll be even cooler once they’ve had some rest and are performing it on tour (who bought tickets to the tour? what? ME?) (oh, you thought I was only a little obsessive, did you?). ;-) I also really liked the Twitch/Courtney hip-hop (yeah, I always love the hip-hop) and the final group routine (despite the WHAT WERE THOSE COSTUMES?).
Fearless prediction: Joshua for the win! But really it could be any of them; they all deserve it. And then they deserve to sleep for like a year. Yay dancers!
More next week!
Quote of the Day:
Stephanie: “Or Jack could be a Blaine.”
PJ: “Who’s Blaine?”
Stephanie: “Chapter Nine! Blaine! The cad, the raconteur, the love ’em and leave ’em type. You know, it’s OK to read my book more than once.”
— My Boys